Books You May have Missed 2021: Combined

A seek-and-find picture book that portrays everyday altruistic efforts. Shriver's text invites readers to notice more than 50 heroic deeds in 10 illustrations. A hospital scene shows "Ten Hidden Heroes working night and day, nursing others back to health until they are okay," including medical staff members reading an X-ray and taking blood pressure. Other images highlight people reading to children, working at a food bank, building homes for those...

This picture book showcases one hundred things little ones can do on their own.

"From The Onion and Reductress contributor, this collection of essays is a hilarious nostalgic trip through beloved 2000s media, interweaving cultural criticism and personal narrative to examine how a very straight decade forged a very queer woman "If you came of age at the intersection of Mean Girls and The L Word: Read this book." -Sarah Pappalardo, editor in chief and co-founder of Reductress. Today's gay youth have dozens of queer peer heroes,...

"A captivating, surprising history of timekeeping and how it has shaped our world. For thousands of years, people of all cultures have made and used clocks, from the city sundials of ancient Rome to the medieval water clocks of imperial China, hourglasses fomenting revolution in the Middle Ages, the Stock Exchange clock of Amsterdam in 1611, Enlightenment observatories in India, and the high-precision clocks circling the Earth on a fleet of GPS satellites...

Evicted from their trailer on New Year's Eve, Henry and his son, Junior, have been reduced to living out of a pickup truck. Six months later, things are even more desperate. Henry, barely a year out of prison for pushing opioids, is down to his last pocketful of dollars, and little remains between him and the street. But hope is on the horizon: Today is Junior's birthday, and Henry has a job interview tomorrow. To celebrate, Henry treats Junior to...

"A heartbreaking and inspiring true story of a New Orleans high school football team and their head coach's mission to protect his players' lives"-- Provided by publisher. Short on hope but big on dreams, the mostly poor and marginalized residents of the New Orleans neighborhood of Algiers find joy on Friday nights when the Cougars of Edna Karr High School take the field. For years, this football program has brought glory to Algiers, winning three...

"When Unit Four—a biological soft robot built and stored high above the Jovian atmosphere—is activated for the first time, it’s in crisis mode. Aliens are attacking the Helium-3 mine it was created to oversee, and now its sole purpose is to defend Earth’s largest energy resource from the invaders in ship-to-ship combat. But something’s wrong. Unit Four doesn’t feel quite right. There are files in its databanks it can’t account for, unusual...

"Ada knows that the best place for star-gazing is on the island in Maine where she vacations with her grandparents. By day, she tracks osprey in the trees, paddles a kayak, and hunts for shells. But she's most in her element when the sun goes down and the stars blink to life. Will the fog this year foil her plans, or will her grandfather find a way to shine a spotlight on the vast puzzle of the universe ... until the weather turns?"-- Publisher's...

"Joan Orpí (Piera, 1593-New Barcelona, 1645) is one of the most unknown characters in Spanish history. In this torrential book we are told the odyssey that brought him first to Barcelona, later to Sevilla and finally to America, where he would experience all kinds of outlandish situations. Using historical facts as raw material, and with stellar appearances of characters such as Miguel de Cervantes or the brigand Serrallonga among others, Besora...

"A dazzling history of Africans in Europe, revealing their unacknowledged role in shaping the continent. Conventional wisdom holds that Africans are only a recent presence in Europe. But in African Europeans, renowned historian Olivette Otele debunks this and uncovers a long history of Europeans of African descent. From the third century, when the Egyptian Saint Maurice became the leader of a Roman legion, all the way up to the present, Otele explores...